Emma McKiernan was recently appointed Nord Pool’s Director for Nordic, Baltic, UK & Ireland and is close to celebrating a decade with the company, having joined as a relationship manager to help develop Nord Pool’s UK market.

Before coming on board with Nord Pool Emma was at ELEXON (the UK balancing and settlement company) as a senior consultant responsible for supporting new entrants into the UK power market. Emma is an expert in customer service, having spent her entire working life in the sphere – some 16 years of that within the energy sector. 

As Emma explains, it is the sheer variety in her role, which keeps her engaged and interested: “I really enjoy the variety in my role; one day I can be involved in developing the strategy for our Nordic, Baltic and UK markets and another day could see me supporting one of my strategic accounts with a complex IT integration project or a collateral query. But the common thread is that we all at Nord Pool aim to give customers insight into how our products and services can improve the way they work. I enjoy getting to know Nord Pool customers across our markets, spending time understanding their goals and how Nord Pool can add value.”

Emma is also responsible for conducting Nord Pool’s customer engagement survey and was very pleased with what the most recent survey revealed. “It was great to hear that customers feel we offer best in class support and relationship management. It’s good to know that we continue to get this right! We are also recognised as playing an important and positive role in on-going market design projects.

“That is important because we currently see that customers are really focused on automation as a way to make their operations more efficient and to cut costs. That trend demands that we provide seamless integration solutions to our systems, so that customers can easily access the data they need. And we have also had requests for improvements to our intraday user interface, so that is something we have been focusing on in 2019.”

Emma has also been overseeing Nord Pool’s expansion into central western European markets, a project that has taken up a lot of her time.

“Our customers want access to markets in central Europe. We delivered new intraday markets following the implementation of XBID (now SIDC). Next comes the matching expansion of day-ahead markets as the multi NEMO arrangements fall into place.

“But we also cannot lose sight of the need to maintain our traditional robustness, which our members have come to rely on - keeping our markets up and running, producing accurate and reliable market prices and ensuring the data customers need is available as quickly as possible. That really is our ‘licence to exist’ and the foundation of any power exchange business.”